My children will never have chicken pox scars. I must be out of it because my daughter was a toddler before it dawned on me that she would never go through the rite of passage that was chicken pox when I was a child. Vaccinations had made that an old-fashioned problem like polio. I grew up with a prominent chicken pox scar on the tip of my nose that traveled up my nose as I grew and somehow found a spot next to another scar on my forehead as an adult. They don’t really bother me and I have plenty of better things to be self-conscious about. It got me thinking about flaws in general, and how important they are for real (and fictional) people.
Though they won’t have chicken pox scars my kids already have some character-building scars. They are minor, but my daughter has a light scar between her eyes and my son has consistently banged-up knees. I don’t see a problem with these kind of minor imperfections and I think it is part of your personal history, kind of like a roadmap of life. It’s something I have to remember about writing fictional characters. Although they may do incredibly good or bad things, it is often the little quirks that make people endearing and give them personality. An example is Sherlock Holmes playing the violin while thinking. The amateur detective was a drug-addicted genius, but the violin playing showed him to also be vulnerable and capable of producing art, not just science.
That kind of character trait needs to be born organically, though. I can’t just make a list of awesome weird traits and randomly assign them to my principal players. I need to think of how people come about the odd hings they do.
HourADayWriter 